Katherine Booska

Katherine Booska is a PhD student in Jewish history. She works on 20th-century Jewish intellectual history, focusing on the United States and Germany. Her current project opens up how the phrase "Jewish values" inherited discourses from psychology, economics, and theology to create a new framework for 20th-century Jewish ethics. Katherine is broadly interested in how concepts from the human sciences interact with theology and ethical theory to shape historical understandings of time, redemption, and goodness. 

Katherine has previously written about Freudian group psychoanalysis, Christian Zionism, and T.S. Eliot. Her work on Catholic thinker Thomas Molnar appeared in Antiliberalism in the Twentieth Century: Beyond Left and Right? (Routledge, 2025). She has previously coordinated the Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno Reading Groups, and she currently works as the Book Reviews Editor for UC Berkeley's Journal of Right-Wing Studies. Katherine is an American Religions in a Global Context Fellow at Stanford. Outside the History Department, she teaches kindergarteners and works with the Stanford Jail and Prison Education Program.